Being a researcher in Psychology, I thought there would be huge literature to study in my field of interest, but I was wrong. I researched on my topic for more than a month, but there was nothing relevant to my study. How do I find the proper study on my topic when the topic has so little of the literature? Please help me out.

Hi. I completely understand your problem because I had been in the same situation. While in my PhD days I couldn’t find any relevant literature to carry forward my research, I was going to give up in the midway. But let me tell you that not giving up was the best decision and I hope you are not thinking of giving up. There is nothing like no relevant study of a topic. You have to make the literature pertinent to you. Make use of the information in your domain and mould it as per your topic. Around a billion researches in the world, there must be at least one research talking about your topic; however, you have to jot down the elements from that research and find information on those elements. Let’s say your research is about something happening in the 10th century and you can’t find enough material about the era, revolve your topic around it. Grab information about 13th-century politics, social norms, and other things to compare it with the 10th century and coming back to your topic.

@Anubhav – you have an excellent idea to keep working on your topic but will that do justice to the topic? Will the researcher be able to prove his statement and will the research be fruitful? I doubt that because with this the researcher will be just beating around the bush.

@Aditi – You cannot say that the researcher will be beating around the bush because what I mean to say here is that if there is not sufficient information or literature on the topic, the researcher must go beyond the topic to make way back to it. It is more like making use of the existing literature and finding key points for your research in them.

Well, you sure do have a point, but I still think that the research will be vague if the researcher is going around the topic and not into it. However, I think that the scholar should think once again whether the topic is worth pursuing or not? If there is not sufficient information or literature on the topic then maybe it is not worthy enough for you to put so much of efforts as the results and findings will not be upto the mark. But if you think that the research will bring growth in the field then you should make every possible attempt to do something on the topic.